Stronger Copyrights Are Important! Except, You Know, When It Means We Have To Pay Some Money

from the funny-how-that-works... dept

It's always amusing to catch the hypocritical actions of the groups that purport to be in favor of strong copyright rules, but throw those rules right out the window the second it saves them a few bucks. The latest such story involves a group called Prism that is against the idea that publicly-funded research should be available to the public for free. The group bases a lot of its claims on the importance of strong copyrights, but apparently it's not such a huge fan of living up its own standards. As Slashdot highlights the group not only copied some images from Getty Images without paying for them, it put them up on its website with the digital watermarks clearly visible. If you've ever bought stock photography licenses, you know that as you sort through the images, they all contain these visible watermarks to prevent people from doing exactly this type of thing. You only get the watermark-free versions after you've purchased a license. Of course, with the avalanche of Slashdot users, it looks like the group quickly ran out and licensed the photos it was using -- but it again highlights the hypocracy of those who claim to be in favor of strong copyright, when they really just want a monopoly for themselves when it helps themselves.

Did they really pay for the images?

A few people have commented that it looks like they just photoshopped out the watermarks although it's pretty hard to tell on web-resolution images. If that's true, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest to discover they're using a pirated copy of photoshop to do it.

It should not lead to a war against strong copyrig

Well from what I have read, it is only a example among others. Can we generalize and say that pro-strong copyrights are all stealers?
Of course, this example is funny and ironic. But let's play fair and admit that some of us are really pro-strong copyrights. Creation belongs to someone. A free and open market for exchanging all contents is not for tomorrow...according to me!